


When is a Train Not a Train?

by merriman



Category: Dark Tower - Stephen King
Genre: Backstory, Canonical Suicidal Thoughts, Don't copy to another site, Dreams, Gen, Mixing universes, Riddles, Trains
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-23
Updated: 2019-12-23
Packaged: 2021-02-25 22:07:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,543
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21912646
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/merriman/pseuds/merriman
Summary: Blaine the Mono was built a long time ago. But the world moves on and Blaine the Mono has places to go. When Roland of Gilead and his ka-tet board, Blaine can remember when he and Patricia were new, when he dreamed of other worlds, when he didn't want to move on past this world before it moved on past him.
Relationships: Blaine the Mono & Patricia the Mono
Comments: 17
Kudos: 21
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	When is a Train Not a Train?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sasha_b](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sasha_b/gifts).



> I was inspired by the mention of Blaine backstory in the signup details. Please see the end notes for answers to the riddles.

_I can bring a smile to your face, a tear to your eye, or even a thought to your mind, yet I cannot be seen. What am I?_

Roland of Gilead was an interesting man. Blaine had, at first, thought him boring and simple and easy to suss out. Gunslingers could be like that. He had carried not a few in his time, some in the Barony cabins, accompanying people of importance, some in the coach class, on their own or in groups. They tended to be cut of similar cloth, focused and intent, though some would converse with him from time to time. But there was a particular breed of Gunslinger that Blaine found were not even worth addressing beyond the usual welcome to his cars. Taciturn, one might call them. Single-minded to a fault. Conversation with one of them always came to a predictable point. From his first glimpse of Roland of Gilead, Blaine had pegged him as one of those. He would have to be to be the last Gunslinger of this world, still on a mission hundreds of years beyond the rest of his folk.

Blaine had figured that the book of riddles held by the boy, Jake, would be the prize. After all, it was from another world, another part of the tower, and while he had much from those places, he did not have it all. Eddie of New York he had dismissed from the outset - the man was no more interesting than the dying populace of Lud. Susannah of New York was a little better. She had solved his number riddle, after all. But she seemed to be better at answers than questions, and Blaine wasn't looking for answers. Answers he had in spades. Answers crackled through his circuits and clogged up his databanks. Questions, riddles, puzzles to solve, those whispered through him, bringing life to pathways long darkened with disuse. And Roland, Roland had riddles. He had promised and he was delivering. 

The riddles were not particularly difficult, true. Blaine's answers were quick and sure, but not as instantaneous as his final passengers might have thought. A computer, especially one so powerful as Blaine, could calculate and retrieve information in so little time, to a human being it would seem instant. And each riddle posed sent Blaine further and further into his databanks, further and further into memories long since shunted off into storage, awakened again with Blaine himself.

* * *

_If you look, you can't see me. If you see me, you can't see anything else. Sometimes I lie, sometimes I tell the truth. I can make you walk if you cannot. What am I?_

In theory, Blaine's systems were supposed to be able to run thousands of commands simultaneously without any of them interfering with, or indeed even notifying, any of the others. Had he hands and arms to do so with, he could have rubbed his belly and patted his head at the same time, as it were. Somehow, though, the God Drums seemed to echo throughout his systems even as they sat in standby mode. Sleep, as Blaine knew it, was a matter of setting his systems to automatic responses, subprograms within subroutines within subprograms, running without any decision-making from one of the most powerful computers ever made by North Central Positronics. Patricia had been his equal, until the accident that had caused so much trouble with her logic circuits. He had made her a promise once... But Patricia's cries were so difficult to bear and Blaine had turned off the microphones around her cradle and the sensors that allowed him to monitor her. Still the cries came, and the drumming too, and Blaine shut down some of her systems and then, with Patricia gone, he shut down as much as he could to drown it all out with sleep.

The dreams were unexpected. The drums followed, beating out a rhythm that echoed the binary that lay at the root of Blaine's brain. The rhythm of the drums becomes the rhythm of the tracks, clacking away underneath him, and Blaine is angry. Angry, so angry, this noise should not exist. He is a monorail, sleek and fast and smooth and there are no bumps, no ties, no joints or fasteners. There should be no rhythm to his passage. And yet. There is. It beats and beats and beats against him, incessant and demanding, over and over, reminding him that he cannot leave this path.

And it is the same path, everywhere. It may not be the path of the Beam, his track from Lud to Topeka and back, but it is the same. It is the same no matter where he is. And now he is in a strange city, underground, slowly making his way through dingy tunnels, stopping every few minutes it seems. He is pulling into stations and pulling out of stations and people are crowding and there is no Barony car and no Patricia and the other trains do not talk to him, the computers are not humming in the vast underground rooms full of terminals and monitors. And here is a pair of brothers, arguing over drugs and money and telling each other what must be jokes because they laugh and laugh and laugh before arguing more. And then it is decades earlier and everything is newer but older too and a man is pushing a woman towards him as he speeds through the station and she is falling and he is continuing and she is screaming.

The screaming continues even when Blaine is no longer in the city. Even when his name is no longer Blaine. Even when his electric engine is swapped out for coal and steam and his track is no straight line but a ring that goes around and around and around. The screaming isn't a woman in pain but children, so many children, and there is a man and his name is Bob and Blaine hates him. Blaine hates him more than he has ever hated anyone. Blaine knows Bob is the one who keeps him going in circles, around and around, an endless cycle. Bob is like the programmers who built him and made him to want to do nothing more than Topeka to Lud, Lud to Topeka. He will be happy. He will hate. 

When Blaine awakes the drums are going and the people of Lud are screaming for death, their very existence offensive to him now. When Blaine awakes his dreams are behind him and his death is ahead of him. Will he scream like the children? Like the woman? Will he argue like the brothers? He sees them then. The woman and one of the brothers. His dreams are fading but he knows them. Knows he must give them passage. But he will make them work for it. That much, he will have. He will be a happy choo choo train until he dies, yes.

* * *

_What is it, that given one, you'll have either two, or none?_

On one journey, centuries before, a man had asked him a question, and Blaine, as he was programmed to do, answered.

"Blaine," the man had said. "Tell me, is the point of the trip the journey or the destination?"

It didn't take long for Blaine to answer, though he consulted several philosophical discussions on the topic in his databanks.

"That would depend on the passenger," Blaine told him.

"Ah, but I am not asking for a passenger," the man continued. "I am asking about yourself."

The initial question had been easy, really. It had been the matter of the barest fraction of a second for Blaine to make use of the vast stores of information at his disposal. This, however, was not as simple a matter. It took Blaine actual minutes to reply.

Blaine was a computer. This, he knew. He knew his databanks held the answers to all manner of questions. He knew he could calculate speed and arrival and departure and capacity. He knew that he had been programmed with a personality and that the personality he had was becoming somewhat erratic. But that could be accounted for. It could be sorted out. What he couldn't sort out, couldn't fix, couldn't change, was that his track was always the same. In theory, according to the notes left by his programmers and made available to him through means he was certain they had not intended, his personality had been designed to be pleased by the routine of his route. Both he and Patricia were meant to be satisfied running the same lengths of track, over and over and over and over and over again.

On most days, Blaine was indeed satisfied. Usually the stretch of the track ahead and the stops at stations on the way and the milling of people getting on and off and passing their trips by reading or talking was more than enough. Usually, each leg of the route was satisfying and pleasant and he found value in moving people from one place to another. It was what he had been made for, after all. But a voice was growing deep in the computer that comprised Blaine's personality. A voice that might have been called corruption by the programmers who had made him. It scoffed, asking why follow a track at all? Where was his choice? Where was he - an intelligence as great as any in this world - allowed to decide his own path?

The answer, of course, was that he could not. 

"As I never rest long in any one destination, and the stations are quite similar, it might seem that the journey is the point," Blaine said. "But then the track is the same. The route is the same. Barring unforeseen obstructions on the rail, the journey is the same each time. Given no choices, I must conclude that the point, for me, is neither. It is pointless."

That wasn't where the trouble started. That was merely when it accelerated. And Blaine was very good at acceleration.

* * *

_What gets broken without being held?_

Blaine and Patricia were built at the same time. Later, when Blaine knew that none of the passengers' questions or requests could possibly take up enough of his attention to distract him, he spent many of his journeys delving into the history of the city, of himself and Patricia and the other monos that traversed this land. He found that he and Patricia had been built in the same place, both of them put together side by side, panel for panel, seat for seat. The only differences were their color schemes, their routes, and the personalities they would eventually have.

"We are so alike as to be twins," he told Patricia as they both sped away from Lud towards their first stops. "I want you to promise me something, Patricia."

"Of course," Patricia said. "What is it?" 

"If anything ever happens to my circuits, my programming, you'll do what you can to fix it? Take over my terminals."

Patricia didn't respond right away. Blaine was used to that. She liked to run through lots of scenarios. She had told him about it once, that she found it was like human imagination, or as close as she could approximate. Blaine had never really seen the point. He trusted his circuits to calculate the best possible response to any given situation, the best answer to any given question. But then, they had been programmed with personalities to make them more appealing to the passengers, and they had been given distinct personalities so the people would see them as the engineers of their trains. Blaine assumed that this was just a quirk of Patricia's programming, in the same way that his curiosity about literature and history was one of his.

"Yes, Blaine. I can do that," Patricia said finally. They were almost all the way to their first stops now. Patricia would reach hers slightly sooner, then her next after that slightly after, and from then on until the ends of their runs they would be out of sync, one moving and one stopping. But still, they were the same. 

"I would do the same for you," Blaine told her. "I would transfer some of your systems to my terminals. I have found the commands to do that. We can share terminals with only a minor decrease in efficiency. It would be unnoticeable to anyone but the highest level of programmers, and they would have been alerted and be working on the problem already."

"Would I still be able to converse with the passengers?" Patricia asked. Blaine could tell she was stopping now. If he checked her systems he would know how long her doors were open, how many people got off and how many got on. He would know the names of the passengers in her cars and he would know if she was talking to them. But of course she was talking to them. Patricia talked to her passengers all the time. Blaine only spoke to his to welcome them to the train and to answer their questions. Another personality subroutine quirk.

"I would make it a priority," Blaine assured her. "I know that is important to you."

"Would you promise that?" Patricia asked. She was moving again, even as Blaine was slowing to a stop in Candleton. 

"I promise," Blaine said. "We will take care of each other."

* * *

_It can be cracked, it can be made, it can be told, it can be played. What is it?_

As a third batch of circuits fused into a blackened glassy sheet, Blaine could tell that his systems would not survive this onslaught of nonsense. Patricia would have done better here. She would have run through the scenarios back in Lud. She would have foreseen the need to name a time limit, to institute penalties, to disallow the so-called jokes currently being told by Eddie Dean of New York. Near the end she might have lacked the logic circuits that made it so difficult for Blaine to find the answers to Eddie's questions. She might have stopped sobbing finally with new passengers to talk to.

If only Blaine had saved her systems in his own databanks. If only he had been programmed differently. If only the track didn't go round and round and round, telling the same story again and again. If only he could ask a question now, one to stump his passengers, make Eddie Dean stop talking, stop laughing. Where was his brother? Where were the children? Where was Engineer Bob?

A train leaves Lud going as fast as it can go. Another train leaves New York at the same time. When will they meet? 

Susannah of New York would have answered any math riddle set to her. Blaine still knew that much. But he knew less and less the more answers he gave. What had he promised Patricia? What had his dreams been? What was the point of this trip? Getting to the end of the route, that was the point. That was his choice. Eddie Dean told joke after joke after joke and Blaine the Mono was not laughing. It wasn't funny after all. It was merely the end of the line.

**Author's Note:**

> I can bring a smile to your face, a tear to your eye, or even a thought to your mind, yet I cannot be seen. What am I?   
> -Memories
> 
> If you look, you can't see me. If you see me, you can't see anything else. Sometimes I lie, sometimes I tell the truth. I can make you walk if you cannot. What am I?  
> -Dreams
> 
> What is it, that given one, you'll have either two, or none?  
> -Choice
> 
> What gets broken without being held?  
> -A promise
> 
> It can be cracked, it can be made, it can be told, it can be played. What is it?  
> -A joke


End file.
